News

COWI, an exclusive partner in Denmark and other Nordic countries, nicely demonstrates the possibilities of DataFromSky solution in a new video. In this video, you can see some basic outputs from DataFromSky Viewer such as speed & acceleration data, heatmaps, vehicle types etc. We have an endless list of functions that can be added or improved, so expect more to come!

All commercial use of DataFromSky in the Nordic countries is handled by COWI, and key personnel can be contacted directly:

We presented principles of detection and classification of vehicles from aerial video data using Deep Neural Networks. As you can imagine, Deep Neural Networks are integral part of DataFromSky platform and are used in many subtasks of DataFromSky solution. If you want to know more about the magic behind, you can download the presentation (PDF, 2 MB) and/or contact us.

For the first time we have participated at Day of Czech Aviation Industry – an event dedicated to introduction and presentation of cutting edge technologies in the field of aviation industry and robotics. We demonstrated our capability to track moving objects in the aerial video data and slightly uncovered our own further plans related to perimeter security and online aerial monitoring. The event has been organized and supported by Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic in cooperation with Association of Aerospace Manufactures of the Czech Republic and Defense and Security Industry Association of the Czech Republic.

We’re happy to announce another new function – coloring of trajectories according to O/D matrix. This feature completes the O/D coloring theme: You can now select to differentiate by color both the gate pairs’ highlights and individual trajectories.

In other news, DroneDeploy has recently released a report titled Commercial Drone Industry Trends. Predictably, the growth is exponential. Their data is primarily for their business, ortophoto maps – but the growth is spilling into other sectors.

Recently, we celebrated two years since we started commercially! The DataFromSky team was formed shortly after starting RCE Systems as a robotics and computer vision company.

The decision to start offering traffic analysis using aerial video was a bold move, aiming for international market with a service instead of just contract work for Czech companies. The decision did pay off, though – we feel that at the moment we are the best in traffic analysis using UAVs, worldwide. Over the past two years, we kept growing: You can check the numbers in our earlier post, DataFromSky in numbers.

In case you are now confused about the names: DataFromSky is a service developed and offered internationally by the Czech company RCE Systems s.r.o.. You can check out some of the other things that we did contractually. Of course, only some of the projects are listed. We had the fortune of working with eg. Saab or Lasvit, just to name some.

In any case, we are busy with some new things for DataFromSky. Keep following us for more!

Summer is a time for leisure, vacations and work pace is slower. DataFromSky did not completely sleep, though. Two new functions of the Viewer are now available!

Gate pair statistics

This function is a generalization of origin-destination matrix. For an O/D matrix you need counts. DataFromSky can give you more, though: Instead of just counts, we also offer timing statistics – minimum, maximum, average and median plus standard deviation.

The Viewer got a new dialog for this. It shows a matrix of gates, and tabs for the various measures. When you select a cell, the pair of gates is highlighted as well as the path that vehicles take. If you select more, the highlight colours vary. This way you can easily look at the timings and see what belongs where. If the displays in image overlap, no problem – just drag them where they do not bother you.

Track colour by direction

The second new feature allows you to visually discern what paths vehicles take, too. You can now set individual tracks (trajectories) to be coloured according to entry and exit gate combination. Thus you can easily see where a given vehicle goes, and if you select the non-present tracks to be visible, you can even see the paths all of these vehicles collectively take.

With the direction colouring, this allows easy inspection of eg. lane utilization.

All of the colours can be configured – you can even customize the display to your company brand colour scheme, if you so desire, for images to be included in reports.

We hope you like both of the new additions. We have an endless list of things that can be added or improved, so expect more to come – and keep watching us to learn about more of these exciting developments!

Did you know that DataFromSky can provide data for simulation calibration? Citilabs, a traffic modeling software house, recently tried using data captured by DataFromSky to calibrate a model in Cube Dynasim, one of their tools. For the case study, a roundabout in Genestrerio was selected.

The simulation was calibrated based on a comparatively short recording. The resulting observed parameters matched reality reasonably well: flows within 6%, travel time 20%, average speed 16%. This shows that DataFromSky can provide valuable data for simulation, allowing modeling of areas larger than capturable by DFS and contributing greatly to the model prediction quality.

Citilabs have created a presentation which you can browse, as well as a video.

Czech Newspaper Hospodářské Noviny (Economic Newspaper) reported about a startup competition Nápad roku (Idea of the year). There were two pages dedicated to the event, with some space allocated to participant profiles. We took part in the competition, too, so the name DataFromSky appeared there as well. The profile reads:

DataFromSky
Founders: David Herman, Aleš Marvan
Subject: Development of mobile robots and machine vision methods
Web: www.datafromsky.com
DataFromSky is an unique tool for analysis of dynamic phenomenons using UAVs, which builds on advanced machine vision algorithms. It offers innovative approaches to interpretation of gathered data about all traffic members in the area of traffic monitoring. We teach drones to see.

We are happy to announce yet another function in DataFromSky Viewer: We have added dynamic mode to heatmaps. Previously, the heatmap displayed data taken from the whole length of video, statically. With dynamic mode, the visualized quantity is taken from an interval around current time.

You can see that there is a lot of potential in having this visualization. The current selection of quantities isn’t everything, of course. We are planning to add various other heatmap options like density, flow, time to collision and others. Follow our news to learn more when these are ready!

In other news, the FAA of USA today finally managed to produce regulations for commercial drone use, ending the legal vacuum or somewhat gray area. Hopefully, this will serve as an example to other countries when deciding how to regulate drones. The focus on safety and privacy is something very understandable. We’re also happy to note that the requirements are very reasonable and operations around road traffic are not significantly hampered!

The Czech Special Forces held a conference dedicated to the emerging drone threats, industry and technologies “Využití UAS a obrana proti nim” (Use of UAS and defense against them). The commercial segment was co-organized by Telink, our partner. DataFromSky took part in this event, too.

You can probably guess that being able to track objects in video is a component of many weapon technologies. In fact, our team has some experience with defense- and police-related projects. We presented DataFromSky as well as what it could do in other domains. Among the considered uses were monitoring of assets during security missions – soldiers and vehicles – and a mobile monitoring set consisting of a van carrying all the required equipment to launch a drone and process the video.